The Dangers of a Good Time.

“Well I'll tell you something, this is no longer a vacation. It's a quest. It's a quest for fun! I'm gonna have fun, and you're gonna have fun. We're all gonna have so much fun we'll need plastic surgery to remove our smiles!”

-Clark W. Griswold, American Food Additive Pioneer

This is a cautionary tale. As the saying goes, comedy equals tragedy plus time. Perhaps for family vacations, treasured memories are just profound misfortune coupled with the rose colored glasses of hindsight. When my boys were still quite young, my family decided to go camping for the weekend. I agreed like any self respecting masochist might. “Who needs a bed and a shower, lets go sleep on the ground and poop into a big hole where lots of strangers have been doing the same thing for decades.”

Things started off just fine. We met up with friends, set up our tent with a lovely little slot canyon wandering away at the back of the site, and prepared dinner over the fire. I may have even pulled out my guitar and strummed a few songs. It was the Leave It to Beaver picture of the American nuclear family plum with a Gene Autry backing soundtrack. 

But shortly after dinner the storm clouds began to form, both literally and figuratively. As the sky darkened my oldest son, somewhere around 4 at the time, declared he wasn’t feeling great and wanted to go to bed early. If this had been a tragicomedy, that innocent little “I want to go to bed” would have been foreboding for the audience, knowing what was to come. For us in the real world, however, we thought nothing of it. Oh, the innocence.

20 minutes later the rest of the family was roused from our continued campfire revelry by blood-curdling crying coming from the tent. I rushed over and unzipped the flap to see my son, now sitting bolt upright in his sleeping bag, projectile vomiting on every absorbent surface he could find. And there were a lot of absorbent surfaces; pillows, blankets, jackets, stuffed animals…it was a padded cell that was being generously coated with my son’s partially digested dinner. He was like an olympic sharp shooter. He’d look around to find something he’d not yet befouled and set his aim on that. 

When it was done my wife and I set to cleaning things up as best we could with the quiet reservation only parents of young children seem to possess. Our life at the time was full of bodily fluids, so this was nothing too out of the ordinary. It was sometime around this that the clouds overhead opened up and started a light drizzle so we decided to call it a night. 

Lying in a sleeping bag, even a slightly bile-scented one, in a tent while a light rain falls is quite lovely. As I recall I spent some time reading by headlamp and listening to the soft pitter patter overhead. Surely the rain couldn’t possibly last all night, we are technically in a desert here in the Gunnison Valley. I was charmed. Charmed, that is, until my youngest decided to take after his brother. No verbal communication, no nothing, he just opened up his mouth and began to spew up bits of hot dog. In hindsight, it seems pretty rude, even for a two year old. 

The rain began to fall in earnest as my wife and I again did what we could to clean things up in the darkness. We settled the boys into their sleeping bags and soon enough everyone but dad was sleeping…I was starting to take notice of just how heavily it was raining.

This might be a bit of an overshare, but at the time I had undiagnosed BPH, which means that my bladder was about the size of a lima bean and as efficient as a Yugo. Apparently I’d been hydrating really well because I began an infuriating all night pattern of getting up every 45 minutes or so. Initially I’d get myself fully decked out with a rain jacket and wander my way through the dark to the aforementioned community fecal depository. As the evening wore on, however, my efforts became more and more shall we say “streamlined”…eventually culminating in me wandering outside with nothing on but cowboy boots so I could relieve myself in one of the gathering puddles on all sides of the tent. 

Then came the wind. Oh, the wind. It gusted the sides of the tent in such a way I’d only seen in documentaries about summiting Everest. At this point the charming pitter patter of the rain had been replaced by a fearful monsoon and a growing existential dread as to the threat the slot canyon behind our campsite posed. 

Oh and somewhere in here both kids decided to throw up again, I forgot to mention that. 

Between my Judas Iscariot bladder and the terror plaguing my thoughts, I decided the most logical way to address my insomnia would be to go outside and dig a protective trench. So there I was, in the midst of an unexpectedly persistent deluge, completely naked save for some cowboy boots, with a pickaxe in my hand channeling water from the mouth of the slot canyon. I shutter to think what someone driving through the campsite at that moment might have thought. Somewhere the scene turned from Leave It to Beaver to Night of the Living Dead.

Eventually I gave up, surrendering to whatever horrors the rest of the night might hold…now convinced that my feeble earth moving attempts weren’t doing much to help. At around 5 a.m. I mercifully drifted off to sleep, lulled to slumber by gale force winds, buckets of rain, and the sweet smell of throw up.

I woke up an hour and a half later to clear blue skies convinced that the best thing to do was pack it up and go home. We laid our cards on the table and we lost…big time. There was nothing to do for it but admit defeat, and admit defeat we did. I threw our soaked and sandy gear haphazardly into the back of the car and drove us home. We arrived tired, dirty, and ready to forget the previous 12 hours. Alongside my stalwart and beautiful bride we would labor to wipe away the detritus of our ill-fated camping venture and begin life anew. It was then, as I peered over to the house, that I saw her in all of her radiant glory, hunched over in the front yard vomiting into the bushes. 

I did the clean up, eagerly waiting for the rose colored glasses to kick in.